A Paradise Built in Hell (28 page)

Several men have worn the tight red-and-yellow outfit with the big SB on the chest, but only one man is publicly identified with Super Barrio: ex-revolutionary, former prisoner,
La Jornada
columnist, tenant organizer, and restaurateur Marco Rascón. His restaurant is a little fish joint in a fairly nice part of Mexico City, and he himself is kind, burly, grizzled, and hospitable, even to would-be interviewers with lousy Spanish who show up at closing time. When he spoke of the origins of Super Barrio, he spoke of himself, but also of El Santo. He recalls, “When we initiated the work of working with tenants in the center, in the historic region of Mexico City, there was a landowner who threatened the tenants with eviction. At that time El Santo had just died, so I proposed that the saint of the tenants appear to defend the tenants—it would be the ghost of the saint. At that time we were still very square militants, where playing with humor and with theatrical forms and performance was concerned. Now it is common but back then, we’re talking 1983 and we had very rigid ideas. The people who struggled had to show we suffered, that people were exploited, the people had to be sad, the iconography was people that were very angry or very sad; those were the forms of the militancy and social struggle of the Left. I tried to insert humor, but there was no support in that moment.

“Another thing that existed in 1985 was that the lucha libre was very looked down upon; it was a thing for the poor and for vulgar people—it was vulgar. We went to save a woman so that they wouldn’t evict her from her house—we went to defend her and upon our return I told them the story of El Santo, and we were walking with many people . . . and then we began to say we could do Super Barrio, so one woman said ‘Yes!’ So some went to buy the tennis shoes, and we were saying let’s make it red and yellow because those are the colors that we most wanted; another went to buy the mask, another to make the shield on her sewing machine. The next day, when we had a protest, twelfth of June of 1987, Super Barrio appeared for the first time at a protest at the Angel de Inde pendencia Polanco, where there were some offices.”

Rascón continued, “Super Barrio is a personality whose credibility exists while he has a mask on; without the mask, he doesn’t exist. There’s a similar element to earlier national heroes such as El Santo or Zorro, as well as an echo of the pre-Hispanic origin of masks, the warriors in pre-Columbian times who donned animal masks to adopt their qualities. One of the things that has helped maintain Super Barrio’s credibility is that the government has had to deal with him as a confrontational force. In addition, he has never allowed himself to be separated from his popular origins. When he speaks in public, he speaks in such a way that the average person can understand him. What he’s expressing is the feelings of the people, especially those who get lost in the political discourse. That’s why he’s been able to achieve remarkable things. . . .

“The first time he showed up at a demonstration, he joined the neighborhood commission when they went in to meet with the municipal authorities, who were shocked when they saw a masked figure sitting across the table from them. Nowadays it’s not that surprising, of course, but back then, the fact that they had to face a masked man gave us an important weapon. With Super Barrio, we dominated on their own territory. They got into such a defensive position that they couldn’t say no to us on many matters which they had previously opposed.” A year after the superhero’s birth, he was a player in national politics. Rascón recalls how Super Barrio showed up next to the populist alternative presidential candidate “Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, with his face of a statue, with a masked man at his side. The most serious of politicians with a masked man next to him and these pictures were all going all around the world. Cuauhtémoc, the day of the election, the reporters asked him to say who he voted for. And when he came out of the booth, he said, ‘I voted for Super Barrio.’ ” The fiction had become real, and the carnival had possessed Mexican politics, for a carnival that arose from disaster to foment revolution is one way to describe Super Barrio.

Since Super Barrio stepped onto the stage of world politics, political activism around the world has become more festive—more carnival, you could say. But the superhero in the red tights didn’t invent it; it was arising everywhere. Eastern Europe’s civil society tested and stretched the boundaries of the possible with theater, music, and carnival celebrations. Václav Havel convened many of the forces of Czechoslovakia’s “velvet revolution” in his Magic Lantern Theater, though the resurgence of Czech civil society did not really begin with theater but with a band, the Plastic People of the Universe, in 1976, whose liberatory gestures met with repression that triggered more such gestures and a real opening. Celebration of the canonization of local saint Agnes of Bohemia became another step in galvanizing the country’s liberation, just as Mardi Gras antics helped trigger Poland’s insurrection.

Since then, culture and politics, revolution and carnival have grown far closer. For the past twenty years, U.S. radicals have been speaking of “the politics of prefiguration”: of the idea that you can and must embody whatever liberty, justice, democracy you aspire to, and in doing so in your self, your community, or your movement you achieve a degree of victory, whatever you do beyond that. Thus political demonstrations around the country have become less like complaints and more like celebrations. Several groups toward the end of the 1990s took this to carnivalesque extremes, which was only reasonable: if you were protesting against alienation, isolation, and privatization, festivity in public didn’t merely demand but cultivated and reclaimed what was at risk. In the 1999 shutdown of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle, for example, giant puppets, costumes, banners, and, famously, people dressed as endangered sea turtles all played a role. It was both a blockade as potent as that of any general strike in the 1930s and a festive demonstration of what the alternatives look like. Similarly, four years later at the WTO meeting in Cancún, Mexico, a coalition of Mexican campesinos, Korean farmers, and activists from around the world gathered with banners, traditional costumes, musical instruments, parades, and theatrical props. One Korean man, a longtime international activist, committed suicide on the barriers to dramatize the mortal threat to small farmers the proposals held. Thousands of women pulled down barriers with carefully placed ropes. The activists again influenced the course of history—poor nations and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) inside were inspired to stand up to the first world and corporate powers. When the talks collapsed inside, the people outside went wild with joy. Thus it is that one contemporary revolutionary has remarked, “The means are the end.”

That aforementioned revolutionary was Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos of the Zapatistas. Perhaps the greatest melding of carnival, disaster, and revolution came with Mexico’s next round of masked heroes, indigenous revolutionaries from the southeastern mountains and jungles of Mexico, the Zapatistas. It is hard to say what the disaster was. It was the 501 years of colonialism, extermination, and discrimination against the indigenous people of the Americas. It was the long decades of impoverishment and repression under the PRI, which had turned the 1910 revolution’s hopes of
libertad y tierra,
“land and liberty,” into disappointment as the old tyrannies and deprivations continued. And it was the new threat posed to the survival of small farmers, rural communities, and the poor as a whole by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that triggered the uprising, since NAFTA went into effect that New Year’s Day of 1994. Simply surviving with much of their culture intact was already a struggle and a form of resistance for the indigenous peoples who became the Zapatistas. The uprising was not the first uprising in these communities, and yet it was unlike anything the world had ever seen before.

A little more than eight years after the earthquake, the Zapatistas made their presence known with a traditional armed insurrection in which they seized six towns in Chiapas, including the old capital city, San Cristóbal de las Casas. Twelve days after their appearance on the world stage, armed conflict ended and they began to use their other weapons. A demonstration of a hundred thousand supporters in Mexico City helped make the transition. Then the unimaginable and unprecedented happened: they metamorphosed into a revolution whose weapons were words and ideas. They often speak of “the fire and the word,” the fire being armed revolution, the word being the spread of ideas and conversations—nonviolent social change. They were the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, the Zapatista National Army of Liberation, taking their name from the revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata (1879-1919). From the beginning the Zapatistas wore masks, mostly ski masks, though some appear in bandannas. They served the same purpose they always have for outlaws and rebels—and revelers—the protection of identity, but as the years wore on they became a costume of anonymity, making the Zapatistas everyone and no one, like Zorro and Super Barrio.

All the comandantes, male and female, and nearly all the rest of the Zapatistas were indigenous, but one taller, paler figure stuck out, Subcomandante Marcos, whose manifestos, missives, and parables grew into a marvelous new literature combining political analysis, poetic language, anecdote, and humor. He often spoke for the Zapatistas and drew from their lore and worldview, but he contributed his own humor and verve. His “real” identity became an obsession of journalists after the uprising, and when one journalist took him at face value that he had been a gay waiter in San Francisco, he wrote, “Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian on the streets of San Cristóbal, a Jew in Germany . . . a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the metro at 10:00 p.m., a celebrant on the zócalo, a campesino without land, an unemployed worker . . . and of course a Zapatista in the mountains of southeastern Mexico.” This gave rise to the carnivalesque slogan “
Todos somos
Marcos” (“We are all Marcos”), just as Super Barrio claims to be no one and everyone.

Though deeply rooted in indigenous tradition, the Zapatista revolution was a brand-new realization of what revolution could be. The revolutionaries spoke to a global civil society coming into being, sending out dispatches on the Internet that quickly spread and were translated. Laura Carlsen, who moved to Mexico after the 1985 earthquake to work with the unionizing seamstresses, says, “The Zapatista movement proved the power of language to weave global webs of resistance at the same time that it rejected the language of power. Unlike previous revolutionary movements, they did not announce plans to take power and install a new state. . . . The Zapatistas have deepened their commitment to building alternatives from the grassroots rather than controlling, competing for, or often even confronting the formal power of the state. Building autonomy is central to this process. Before the Zapatista uprising, the Mexican indigenous movement had already formulated a concept of autonomy that focused on recuperating traditional forms of self-government in the community.”

If the Zapatistas arose from many long disasters, the society they created in their autonomous regions of Chiapas and that they propose in their globally circulated slogans and writings greatly resembles disaster communities. There is an emphasis on improvisation.
“Caminando pre-guntamos,”
they say, or “We walk asking questions.” Rather than dogma, they have inquiry as a core principle. There is an intense critique of hierarchy and
mandar obediencia,
or “govern by obeying,” is also a recurrent theme, imperfectly realized. At the entrance to one of their communities is a sign that could be at any of them: “Here the people govern and the government obeys.” It is in many ways the society of mutual aid and self-government Kropotkin, among many others, dreamed of. It attempts to render permanent what disaster fleetingly provides: a realm in which people care for each other in the absence of entrenched and alienated authority and the presence of mutual aid, altruism, and love.

Another version of it arose in 2006, when what began as a teachers’ strike in the largely indigenous state of Oaxaca turned into a mass uprising when the teachers were violently attacked. The city of Oaxaca, like Paris during the legendary commune of 1871, was taken over by its citizens, and the police were kept out. Young people guarded the barricades, women took over radio and television stations and created a public forum to discuss society, justice, desire, and possibility. That uprising was crushed, but only after a disaster utopia of improvisational and collective self-governance unfolded. It lasted several months.

Imagine an era when disaster is only disaster, not opportunity, because people already have a powerful and profound role in their societies. Such a society will never arrive as a jubilee, a perfect state, but it has come closer in recent years. The Zapatistas had their revolutionary carnival, and the world fell in love with them, but then came the long, hard job of making a revolution of everyday life, at which they continue to labor. The utopias achieved amid disaster are perhaps the once and future ordinary arrangement of things. And they do not appear only among remote and traditional peoples. They have arisen in the great cities of the twenty-first century, even briefly in the global heart of capital, a stone’s throw from Wall Street.

F
orget everything you heard about September 11, 2001, forget about Al-Qaeda, about the Bush Administration, about terrorism, about air-traffic control, about Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Islam, jihad, crusade, and oil geopolitics. Set aside how the hijacked airliners crashing into two buildings in southern Manhattan spiraled out into wars and laws and the erosion of the Bill of Rights and into prisons, bombs, torture, and the transformation of the world in many complex ways. All of these things matter, as do the planes that crashed into the Pentagon and that field in Pennsylvania, but they obscure other things that also count. These subjects turned faces toward global roots and implications and blocked any direct gaze at the city in crisis. Aspects of that disaster became international immediately, because the United States’ air-traffic control shut down all flights in and out of the United States, because Wall Street was evacuated and markets were affected and alarm spread everywhere, because the world paused to watch and analyze and contemplate this most globally visible spectacle of all time.